Rawabi, the Architectural Prophecy of an Unequal Palestinian State - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
►https://thefunambulist.net/architectural-projects/palestine-report-part-4-rawabi-architectural-prophecy-unequal-palest
Situated in the West Bank between Nablus and Ramallah (see map at the end of this text), the new city of Rawabi materializes a sum of crucial questions about the present and the future of Palestine. Developed by the Bayti Real Investment Company, which is owned in partnership by the Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company and the Palestinian company Massar International owned by charismatic Bashar Masri, the construction of Rawabi started in 2010 at the climax of the politics of development engaged by then Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, former economist for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such developments have particularly changed the face of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority in a deliberate indifference of the Israeli occupation and a consecration of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Furthermore, when it comes to these new neighborhoods built in the North of Ramallah (see the article “Constructing the Ramallah Bubble“) or Rawabi, it has become commonplace to compare their architectural aesthetics and their urban typology on top of hills (“rawabi” itself means “hills”) to the neighboring Israeli settlements — what I called in the past, an “architectural Stockholm syndrome.”